Remember the last time you spent hours searching for an important document or email? I’ve been there, too. I know how the frustration of not finding things can negatively impact our daily activities.

Many years ago, motivated by a lifelong passion for organization, I embarked on a quest to create a system that I wanted to be straightforward to adopt and use. It should have as few steps as possible to set up and use, and it had to be as natural as possible to adopt and maintain. As you can probably imagine, that’s much easier said than done.

Long before thinking about my system, when I started working for big corporations, I realized how much of a problem it was not having a simple way to find information and keep up with activities. However, after trying many existing solutions, it quickly became clear to me that they often felt rigid and unnatural, forcing users to adapt to the system rather than the other way around.

That frequently led to frustration, which in turn meant the team would slowly abandon the plan. But I didn’t give up. There had to be a better approach. Perhaps something more in tune with human behaviors. It would still take several years to find the right solution. In reality, I spent so much energy trying to make this work that it eventually became my job.

Even today, as a consultant, I still dedicate a fair amount of time to listening to how the person does things before coming up with a solution. I then try to build a workflow and adopt software or any technologies that better match how the person does their work. Experience tells me that this approach means more time and effort put into building the system, but it also means it will be a long-term solution.

Helping people resulted in a lot of feedback, which in turn led to the perfecting of the system. It was only over a decade of this feedback loop that I began to realize that basing the system principles and mechanisms on how people naturally think and do things was the correct decision.

I don’t claim to have found perfection because, in a way, it’s physically impossible. As Rudolf Clausius puts it,

“The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

To which I add,

“So does the entropy of your notes and ideas. It’s okay to not obsess over a perfect system, as it is often a waste of your time. Remember that you cannot predict everything, as variables are forever changing.”

It now feels like all this journey has to be converted into a book. But although all these ideas have been in my head for so many years, it doesn’t make it an easy task to organize everything in a comprehensible way. It will take a while to finish, but rest assured that the Timeline System is being documented.